[Socialism Today, No 21, September 1997, p. 6-8]
On 30 July two Palestinians strapped high explosives to their bodies and detonated themselves in Jerusalem’s crowded Manhaneh Yehuda street market. Fourteen people were killed as a result.
“The Israeli response was typically swift and brutal.”
The Israeli response was typically swift, brutal and indiscriminate. A total siege was imposed on the West Bank and Gaza, including a so-called ‚internal closure‘, whereby over a million Palestinians were prevented from leaving the seven West Bank towns under Palestinian Authority (PA) rule. The Israeli army raided West Bank villages under its control, rounding up 200 suspected Hamas supporters – the hard-line Islamic group regarded as responsible for the bombing.
The sanctions mean the health service is in crisis as medical supplies are seriously depleted. The restriction on the movement of labour is costing the Palestinian economy up to £6m a day: two thirds of its total income. Israel is also blocking the transfer of £16m in tax revenue owed to the PA.
Israeli premier Benyamin Netanyahu claims the ’super-blockade‘ is necessary until PA chairman Arafat deals effectively with the ‚terrorist infrastructure‘ of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian-controlled areas. Yet the identity of the suicide bombers is still unknown and it is strongly believed the ‚outside‘ (probably Jordan-based) leadership of Hamas ordered the attack. In reality, Netanyahu doesn’t want to accede that Israel’s security is as vulnerable under his Likud-based right-wing coalition government as it was under the previous Labour regime. Additionally, by damaging the Palestinian economy, he also hopes to weaken Arafat’s negotiating hand in the parlous ‚peace process‘.
Arafat is not in a position to launch a fierce offensive against his Islamist opposition as he did after suicide bombings in 1996. At that time the Oslo peace process was at high-tide. The Israeli army had just moved out of the West Bank cities and Arafat had been elected premier. He could argue that it was necessary to confront fundamentalists to safeguard the peace process and the future promise of a fully-fledged Palestinian state. All that appears illusory now.
In March, Palestinian representatives walked away from the negotiating table after Netanyahu’s decision to construct the Har Homa Jewish settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. Har Homa would complete the wall of settlements enclosing the Arab east of the city and foreclose talks on Jerusalem’s future. Palestinians concluded that Netanyahu was out to destroy the Oslo accords and to change the terms of negotiations so as to make Palestinian aspirations unrealisable. Har Homa would deny them any part of East Jerusalem as a future capital; retain more than half of the West Bank for Israel; and, by linking up Jewish settlements and military installations, create a collection of divided PA cantons.
Oslo, conceived in secret in 1993, has failed because at root it was designed on false premises. The mass uprising of Palestinians – the Intifada – persuaded Israelis of the need to negotiate and in 1992 they thought they had voted for change with a new administration. A war-weary Palestinian population saw the decades old ‚armed struggle‘ going nowhere and were told by Arafat that Oslo would lead to autonomy and then real independence. Yet the ‚final status issues‘, concerning borders and Jerusalem for instance, cannot be permanently resolved in an unstable region plagued by poverty and underdevelopment. Only the socialist transformation of the area could lead to a real democratic settlement whereby Palestinians and Jews, with their own states, could cooperate in voluntary socialist federation.
“The Israeli government has drawn up a plan for a full-scale invasion of the Palestinian areas.”
Jolted by the suicide bombings, the US is now attempting to revitalise the peace process, dispatching special envoy Dennis Ross on shuttle diplomacy. The Clinton administration wants the two parties to reach longer-term agreement for the sake of regional stability. The prospect of full-scale conflict between the Israeli armed forces and the Palestinian police, and indeed the whole PA population, fills imperialism with dread. Recent ‚war games‘, where Israeli military chiefs calculated that overrunning the Palestinian-controlled areas would leave a higher Israeli death toll than the Israeli invasion of Lebanon during 1982, indicate that at least a section of the Israeli ruling class view snuffing out the scattered PA areas as a necessary option at some point. A further period of stalemate, bombings and domestic woes could make the appearance of decisive action hard for someone like Netanyahu to resist. He may want to originally confine Israeli operations in the PA to ‚taking-out‘ terrorists but conflict would not be so neatly confined. Arafat would be compelled to follow the resistance of Palestinians or face being swept aside. Armed groups in the Lebanon would be involved, as would neighbouring Arab states like Syria and Jordan, if the situation spiralled. A much more intractable, unstable situation would be born out of such Armageddon.
Realising this, even the hard-line Israeli administration is likely firstly, and mainly, to take to the road of negotiations again. Netanyahu may have to relax the vice around the Gaza strip and West Bank and begrudgingly re-start talks.
Nevertheless, Arafat has little breathing space. Leaving aside the possibility of any one event igniting the whole situation again, Palestinians are asking: what happened to the implementation of agreements signed with Israel two years ago? Even members of Arafat’s own Fatah organisation talk of ‚returning to the armed struggle‘. He may not hold onto his position in the medium term, despite his autocratic methods, leading to the installation of a much more hard-line Palestinian leadership.
The basis for alternative socialist policies can be gauged in a Israeli poll, conducted before the bombings, which showed 59% in favour of the creation of a Palestinian state and 51% accepting some form of joint sovereignty over Jerusalem. If a developing mass workers‘ party in Israel tied a socialist programme on the Palestinian question to important episodes in the class struggle, like the recent Israeli telephone workers strike against privatisation, then a mighty opposition to right-wing nationalism could be built in Israel which could link up with radical socialists resisting Arafat’s misrule and Israeli repression amongst the Palestinian masses.
Niall Mulholland
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